From a post in another thread:
Make sure you tell a FIRST rep what you think. I had this discussion with a senior manager at FIRST and he clearly had not heard it before. He did say that they were concerned that, as the program keeps growing, that even FRC teams might start to be assigned recycled numbers so that FIRST doesn’t have to use 5-digit numbers. I suggested that FTC programs needed the same respect as FRC, and that permanent numbers might be part of that. It was a good conversation and he clearly took it seriously.
Since so many FTC programs field more than one robot, maybe the “chartering organization” (to use a Boy Scout term) might own the number, and each registered robot (team) would have a sub-number. Like, Exothermic Robotics might be team 575, and, if we fielded three teams again, the robots would be 575-1, 575-2, and 575-3. Or 575A, B and C. As long as the root number for our organization stayed the same, the suffixes could change. This strikes me as good balance between wanting a permanent numerical identity, and changing the number of team registrations from year to year based on the number of students involved. It would be a good system for the FRC teams that field more than one robot, too. No need to have two robots from the same program with completely different numbers. Just a thought…